Thanx for the report. Always encouraging to hear positive feedback from testers :-) . As fast as Gentoo ? I'm impressed. Cheers. --- Alistair Hamilton <alistair@tyeurgain.free-online.co.uk> wrote:
Hello, All
I jumped into OpenSuse at 10B3. I have used SuSE and SUSE for many years, and had recently become a little dishartened.
I run SuSE 8.something on a PIII 133MHz laptop that does printing, DNS and DHCP serving, and 9.3 on an AMD-64 workstation. I also have a Pentium-M Dell I8600 laptop and a P4 2GHz desktop.
SUSE 9.3 installed on the Dell, but performance was truly abysmal. On this machine, 10B3 was a non-starter because the IPW2200 wireless card was non-functional. OTOH, 10B4 installed and enabled everything (OK, I had to copy the IPW firmware manually from a shell terminal) and performance is excellent, as is battery life. It even suspends to disc without tweaking. It also resumes ;-)
SUSE 9.3 failed to install on the P4 machine, which is a workstation that runs Linux and Windows XP as a client in VMWare. I messed with Fedora for a while, but it was not a good experience. It currently runs a mature Gentoo installation. However, I installed 10B3 on a second hard drive, and everything worked without problem, and the machine feels just as responsive as it does with Gentoo - with MUCH less hassle!
I think that a lot of this is probably down to the use of gcc4, which, by many accounts, generates much better code than earlier versions. 9.3 stuck on 3.3.x, and from my Gentoo experience, I know for sure that software compiled with even 3.4.x subjectively feels much better than 3.3.
The 64-bit machine is too important to mess with just yet, but I will certainly install an RC of B10 on one of its drives to test it out.
In conclusion, I think that 10 is a great step forwaFrd. I felt that SuSE/SUSE were getting increasingly bogged down as the 9.x series "progressed". 10 seems to have completely turned this around. Another example of how opening software can produce great work.
The only oddity to me is that as a workstation OS, it is not provided with a preemptable kernel. Again, from Gentoo, I know that this can make a subjective improvement in responsiveness.
Well done all! Alistair
PS. Incidentally, the oldest machine - the P3 - presently has an uptime of over 369 days. It does all DHCP and also does DNS caching for the LAN (using dnsmasq) Since my main workgroup laser printer is hung off its parallel port, it has handled many GB of PostScript in the last year, and has done so with intervention (by ssh - the keyboard and screen are inaccessible) probably about a dozen times. Its NIC is wireless, and there has never been a network reset. Not bad, SuSE!
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